Flirting with Italian

But he hadn’t been there.

He’d had time to think it through, to accept that working together in the goldfish bowl of school would be impossible. He was the one who’d sacrificed the job that was his life. That was how much he loved her.

How much he was in love with someone else.

She’d worked really hard to be worthy of that sacrifice. To think of her students when all she wanted to do was to curl up in a corner and bawl her eyes out.

She’d cleaned every trace of him out of her flat so that she wouldn’t keep tripping over the memories. Put away photographs. Stopped going to the places where they’d hung out with their friends.

But she couldn’t scrub him out of school.

He was an invisible presence in the photographs of the teams he’d coached to glory. In the whiff of steaming boys, the clatter of their boots as they came in from the cricket field. In the sound of a whistle on the sports field that had once linked her to him like an invisible thread, but now went through her like a knife.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’m not losing, I’m catching up on my life. You were the one who was so keen on me taking a gap year, having fun, doing the travel thing before I settled down.’

‘You’re not eighteen now,’ her great-grandfather pointed out. ‘And you’re not taking a year off to see the world or have fun.’

‘I’d feel like a matron amongst the backpackers. This way I get the best of both worlds. Great job. Great location. I only hope I live up to the terrific reference the Head gave me.’

He dismissed her doubts with a wave of his hand. ‘Won’t the language be a problem?’

‘It’s an international school. Children of diplomats, UN officials, foreigners living in Rome,’ she explained.

Eight hundred miles away from everyone who knew her as half of a couple.

It had been Tom-and-Sarah from the first day she’d started at Maybridge High when, shaking with nerves, she’d managed to throw a cup of coffee over the blond giant who was head of the sports department. Instead of calling her the idiot she clearly was, he’d smiled, and in the gaze of his clear blue eyes the world had steadied.

She’d offered to wash his kit. He’d said he’d settle for a pint, and her world had remained steady until a new supply teacher had arrived one dark morning in January when half the staff were laid low with flu.

It had been like watching an approaching car crash that she was powerless to stop. The sudden silence as a new face had appeared in the staffroom. Tom, the first to step forward to welcome her—always, always so kind with new people. The contact had lasted no more than a second or two but time had seemed to stand still as their eyes met and, as Sarah looked on, she’d felt the scorching heat of the spark that leapt between Tom and Louise, and her world had shifted off its axis.

‘I’ll soon get to know people,’ she said. ‘Teaching isn’t a job you can do in isolation. And I’ll be in Rome,’ she stressed. ‘One of the most glamorous cities in the world.’

In one bound she’d freed herself from being the most pitied woman in the staffroom and become the most envied.

Not that she’d escaped entirely. She’d done her best to resist the Head’s suggestion that she write a blog about her experiences.

‘I know it’s been a tough few months, but things will look different after a break. I expect you back next year,’ he’d told her.

‘You don’t need me, Headmaster, you need Tom. Call him.’

‘And have everyone think I’ve got you out of the way so that I can bring him back? How would that look?’ he’d asked.

Dodgy, obviously, she thought, as the penny had dropped. That was why he wanted her to write the blog. So that it would look as if she was still part of the school.

Glowing references had, it seemed, to be paid for. And it wasn’t as if anyone would read it. The staff would be too busy and, as for the kids, well, why would they bother?

Sarah started as Lex took her hand.

‘It’s not far,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be home for visits so often you’ll be sick of me. Half term. The holidays.’

‘What for? To see an old man?’ His gesture was dismissive. ‘Don’t waste your time or your money. Enjoy Italy while you have the chance.’

‘I’ll have plenty of time to see everything.’ And she could travel with the money she’d been saving for her wedding, for the big dress. Her share of the deposit they had been saving for a house. One with a garden for the children they would have had one day.

‘There’s never enough time,’ he warned her. ‘Your life goes by in a flash. Enjoy every minute of it.’

‘Of course,’ she said, on automatic.

‘No, I mean really enjoy it.’ He regarded her with that thoughtful gaze that his patients would have recognised when he had still been in practice. The one that saw through the ‘headaches’ to the real problem. ‘I prescribe an affair,’ he said. ‘No falling in love, breaking your heart stuff, mind. Nothing serious,’ he warned. ‘A just-for-fun romance with some dark-eyed Italian. A memory to make you smile rather than weep. To keep you warm at night when you’re old.’

‘Lex! You are outrageous.’

He grinned. ‘Trust me. I’m a doctor.’

She laughed. ‘Outrageous and wonderful and I love you.’ They’d always been close. Her parents loved her, did all the parent stuff brilliantly. Her grandparents had spoiled her. But Lex was the one who never had anything better to do than tell her stories and, as he leaned back in his chair, his eyes on some unseen horizon, she knew exactly what he was going to say next.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time I was in Italy during the war?’

‘Once or twice.’ It had been a favourite story when she was a little girl.

How his plane had developed engine trouble and he’d had to bail out. How he’d nearly died of the cold.

It was a story that had grown with the years. With the telling. Embellished, embroidered. She’d never known her great-grandmother, but her grandmother had always claimed that he never spoiled a good story by telling the truth. Her mother had simply rolled her eyes.

‘Tell me again,’ Sarah urged him. ‘Tell me how you were saved by a beautiful Italian girl who found you half-dead in the snow. How she nursed you, hid you for months until the Allies arrived.’

‘You know it by heart.’

Maybe she did, but that was the point of a comfort story. Its familiarity.

‘Gran always said you made up most of it. That the lovely Lucia was really some tough old bird who hid you in her cow shed for a week,’ she said, knowing exactly how to get him going. And off her case.

‘Your grandmother knows nothing.’ Nearly ninety but still with a wicked twinkle in his eye. ‘The house had been grand before the Fascists reduced it to rubble. And Lucia was …’ He stopped. ‘Pass me my box and I’ll show you.’

‘Show me?’

There was always some new little twist to the story, some detail to be added: a new danger, a risk taken for food or warmth, a small pleasure to be found amongst the hardship. But this was totally unexpected.

‘The box,’ he repeated.

She’d seen the contents of the old tartan biscuit box a hundred times. There had never been a photograph of Lucia and, as she handed it to him, she half expected it to be a joke of some kind. But there was none of the usual teasing and when he opened the lid, instead of going through it—a memory recalled with each medal, photograph, memento collected during a long life, well-lived—he tipped it up, emptying everything on to the table beside him.

It was a small table and papers, coins, trinkets spilled over onto the floor. Sarah knelt to gather them up. Smoothed out the corner of the small sepia photograph of her great-grandma that he had carried with him through the war.

‘Leave those,’ he said. ‘Your nails are longer than mine. See if you can get this out.’

The base of the box was lined with a piece of black card, scuffed by years of wear. Now, as she eased it out, she discovered that it concealed a photograph.